Some features of Gutnish include the preservation of Old Norse diphthongs like ai in for instance stain (Swedish sten, English stone) and oy in for example doy (Swedish dö, English die). There is also a triphthong that exists in no other Norse languages: iau as in skiaute/skiauta (Swedish skjuta, English shoot).

Most Gotlanders can understand Gutnish, but tend to speak Standard Swedish, as contemporary Gutnish is also closer to Standard Swedish.

There are major efforts to revive the traditional version of Modern Gutnish, and Gutamålsgillet (Gutnish Language Guild) is organizing classes and meetings for speakers of traditional Gutnish. According to the guild's webpage, there are now 1500 people using Gutnish on Facebook.[6]

Like most dialects of Swedish, Gotlandic is under great influence of the Swedish standard language, both through speaker contact and through media and (perhaps most importantly) written language. As a result, Gotlandic has become much closer to the Swedish standard language. There are also many Gotlanders who do not learn the dialect, but speak a regionally colored variant of the standard Swedish. This is characterized mainly by its intonation, but also by diphthongs and tripthongs, some lexical peculiarities as well as the infinitive ending -ä.

The Gutamålsgillet association, which has been working for the preservation and revitalization of Gotlandic since 1945, estimates that Gotlandic is spoken today by 2,000 to 5,000 people.[8] How many are still passive, is not specified. However, an interest in Gotlandic seems to be present: From 1989 to 2011, the radio show Gutamål ran in Radio Gotland[9], which regularly reached about 15,000 to 20,000 listeners,[10] , and in 2008 Gotland University offered their first course in Gotlandic. Gutamålsgillet collects writings of authors and poets who write their texts in Gotlandic, and maintains a Swedish-Gotlandic dictionary and an ever-growing list of Gotlandic neologisms.